Married by the Stork: An Oddly Sweet Berlin Mess

Is this thing even worth the time?

Honestly, it depends on how much you enjoy watching people run around in circles for 90 minutes. If you are into weird, slightly stiff comedies from the early days of sound and visual-heavy storytelling, you will find some charm here. But if you hate movies where the premise feels like it was written on a napkin during a particularly boozy lunch? Stay away. You will be bored to tears.

The whole setup is just so aggressively strange. A sculptor needs a model for a hospital statue, and her solution is to find a London policeman who also happens to be a boxer. Why? I don't know. The movie does not seem to know either, but it just rolls with it.

Notes from the couch

Lil Dagover is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. She has this way of looking at the camera that makes you think she is in on the joke, even when the rest of the film is stumbling over its own feet. There is a scene about halfway through—I think in a studio?—where the lighting just completely washes out her face, and it looks like she is floating in a void. It lasted for way too long. I actually checked to see if my monitor was broken.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Married by the Stork (1932) through its definitive frames.

• The boxing sequences are hilariously fake. It is like they forgot how human arms move.
• The chemistry between the leads is less "sparks flying" and more "polite coworkers trying not to bump into each other."
• The hospital set looks like it is made of cardboard and pure wishful thinking.

It reminds me a bit of the frantic energy in You'd Be Surprised, but without the benefit of being completely self-aware about its own nonsense. Sometimes the movie tries to be this grand, sophisticated romantic comedy, and other times it just devolves into people falling over doors. It is a weird mix.

There is this one moment where a character walks into a room, realizes they have nothing to do, and just turns around and leaves without saying a word. It is the most honest thing in the entire film. I felt that in my soul.

Look, it is not high art. It is not even particularly good art. But it has a heartbeat, which is more than I can say for some of the stuff coming out of the Harvest Festival era of filmmaking. It is dusty, it is weird, and I kind of liked it for that.

Just don't expect it to change your life. It barely changes its own tone from one scene to the next. 🤷‍♂️